Category Archives: curriculum design

Late last month the Larnaca Declaration on Learning Design was published. Being “that time of year” I didn’t get round to blogging about it at the time. However as it’s the new year and as the OLDS mooc is starting this week, I thought it would be timely to have a quick review of the declaration.

The wordle gives a flavour of the emphasis of the text.

Wordle of Larnaca Declaration on Learning Design

First off, it’s actually more of a descriptive paper on the development of research into learning design, rather than a set of statements declaring intent or a call for action. As such, it is quite a substantial document. Setting the context and sharing the outcomes of over 10 years worth of research is very useful and for anyone interested in this area I would say it is definitely worth taking the time to read it. And even for an “old hand” like me it was useful to recap on some of the background and core concepts. It states:

“This paper describes how ongoing work to develop a descriptive language for teaching and learning activities (often including the use of technology) is changing the way educators think about planning and facilitating educational activities. The ultimate goal of Learning Design is to convey great teaching ideas among educators in order to improve student learning.”

One of my main areas of involvement with learning design has been around interoperability, and the sharing of designs. Although the IMS Learning Design specification offered great promise of technical interoperability, there were a number of barriers to implementation of the full potential of the specification. And indeed expectations of what the spec actually did were somewhat over-inflated. Something I reflected on way back in 2009. However sharing of design practice and designs themselves has developed and this is something at CETIS we’ve tried to promote and move forward through our work in the JISC Design for Learning Programme, in particular with our mapping of designs report, the JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery Programmes and in our Design bashes: 2009, 2010, 2011. I was very pleased to see the Design Bashes included in the timeline of developments in the paper.

James Dalziel and the LAMS team have continually shown how designs can be easily built, run, shared and adapted. However having one language or notation system is a still goal in the field. During the past few years tho, much of the work has been concentrated on understanding the design process and how to help teachers find effective tools (online and offline) to develop new(er) approaches to teaching practice, and share those with the wider community. Viewpoints,LDSE and the OULDI projects are all good examples of this work.

The declaration uses the analogy of the development of musical notation to explain the need and aspirations of a design language which can be used to share and reproduce ideas, or in this case lessons. Whilst still a conceptual idea, this maybe one of the closest analogies with universal understanding. Developing such a notation system, is still a challenge as the paper highlights.

The declaration also introduces a Learning Design Conceptual Map which tries to “capture the broader education landscape and how it relates to the core concepts of Learning Design“.

Learning Design Conceptual Map

These concepts including pedagogic neutrality, pedagogic approaches/theories and methodologies, teaching lifecycle, granularity of designs, guidance and sharing. The paper puts forward these core concepts as providing the foundations of a framework for learning design which combined with the conceptual map and actual practice provides a “new synthesis for for the field of learning design” and future developments.

Components of the field of Learning Design

So what next? The link between learning analytics and learning design was highlighted at the recent UK SoLAR Flare meeting. Will having more data about interaction/networks be able to help develop design processes and ultimately improving the learning experience for students? What about the link with OERs? Content always needs context and using OERs effectively intrinsically means having effective learning designs, so maybe now is a good time for OER community to engage more with the learning design community.

The Declaration is a very useful summary of where the Learning Design community is to date, but what is always needed is more time for practising teachers to engage with these ideas to allow them to start engaging with the research community and the tools and methodologies which they have been developing. The Declaration alone cannot do this, but it might act as a stimulus for exisiting and future developments. I’d also be up for running another Design Bash if there is enough interest – let me know in the comments if you are interested.

The OLDS MOOC is a another great opportunity for future development too and I’m looking forward to engaging with it over the next few weeks.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the programme support aspect of my job is that I get to find out about a lot of really innovative work taking place across a diverse range of UK universities. On the flip side of this, I do sometimes yearn to be part of the development of projects instead of always just being on the outside looking in once plans have been made and funding secured. I also often wonder if anything I write about in my blog does actually make any difference or is useful to the wider to community.

So I was delighted yesterday to spend the afternoon at Edinburgh Napier University at an internal seminar exploring their digital future and technological ambitions. I was even more delighted a couple of weeks ago when Keith Smyth contacted me about attending the event, and said that the series of blog posts I wrote with my Strathclyde colleague Bill Johnston on the Digital University, had been really useful and timely for Napier in terms of them starting to think about how to develop their approach to a digital strategy.

Yesterday’s seminar was an opportunity for staff from across the institution to come together and share their experiences and views on what their real needs and aspirations are in terms of the future (digital) shape of the university. Napier are already involved in a number of innovative projects internally, and are committed to open practice, particularly in regards to their work in learning technology. For example their 3E Framework for effective use of technology in teaching and learning, is available via a CC licence and is being used/adapted by over 20 institutions worldwide who have all agreed to share their adaptations. A great example of how open practice can not only improve internal working practices but also have an impact in terms of helping community knowledge grow in an open, shareable way too. The framework is also linked to a resource bank,with examples of the framework in action, which again is openly available.

Like many institutions, podcasting is a growing trend and their College2Uni podcasts which were originally designed to help student transition from college to university are now being used for wider community driven information sharing initiatives. Plans for an open access journal are also well underway.

But what/where next? What should the long, medium and short term goals for the institution be? Participants were asked to consider “what will today’s ten year old’s expect when they come to University in 2020?” Delegates were divided into six groups set short (i.e. can be in place in a year) as well as longer term aspirational goals. The six themes were:

Again, another wee ego boost, was seeing how the matrix Bill and I have developed, provided a framework for the discussions and planning of the workshop.

MacNeill/Johnston conceptual matrix (revised, October 2012)

It was also a good opportunity for me to highlight work from a number of JISC programmes including Developing Digital Literacies, Assessment and Feedback, and Curriculum Design and Delivery and the growing number of resources from all these programmes which are available from the Design Studio.

There was a genuine enthusiasm from all the delegates a number of suggestions for easily achievable short term goals including single sign on for all uni accounts, more co-ordinated and easily accessible communication channels (for staff and students), experimenting with lay out of lecture spaces, developing a more coherent strategy for mobile devices. Longer term goals were generally centred on ubiquitous access to information, continuous development of staff and student skills including supporting open practices, ways to differentiate Napier and how to take advantage of affordances of the all pervasive MOOCs and indeed the changing landscape of HE. Content maybe more plentiful in 2020 but not everyone has the skills to take an MIT/Stanford/Everyotherbignameuniversity open course without support. There are a lot of skills which we know employers are looking for which aren’t supported through these large scale distance models of education. The need for new spaces (both digital and physical) for experimentation and play for both staff and students was highlighted as a key way to support innovation. You can get a flavour of the discussion by searching the #digiednap archive.

The next steps for Napier, are the forming of working group to take forward the most popular ideas from the session. There was a bit of the old “dotmocracy” with delegates voting for their preferred short terms ideas:

and work on more strategic developments over the coming year. I am really looking forward to working with colleagues in Napier as a critical friend to these developments, and being part of a project from the outset and seeing first hand how it develops.

For the past four years I’ve been part of the support team for the JISC Curriculum Design Programme, and it has been a fascinating journey for everyone involved and has provided the basis for many a blog post here. The final synthesis report for the programme is now available from the Design Studio.

Making sense of the varied findings of 12 projects over nearly 4 years is no mean feat, but Helen Beetham (with support from the rest of the team particularly Gill Ferrell, Marianne Sheppard and a little bit from me) has done a fantastic job. The report reviews the four main areas of investigation: improving curriculum processes, reforming course information, enhancing design practice and transforming organisations.

The main conclusions are:

*More transparent processes with shared, accessible representations of the curriculum can support better stakeholder engagement in curriculum design
*More efficient processes can save considerable administrative staff time, and may free up curriculum teams to focus on educational rather than administrative concerns
*A focus on the design process rather than its outcomes allows both for lighter-weight approval events and a shorter review cycle with more opportunity for continuous enhancement
*A single, trusted source of course information can be achieved through a centralised academic database, but similar benefits can be gained through enhancing the functions, interfaces and interoperability of existing systems.
*Trusted, relevant, timely information can support educational decision making by curriculum teams.
*Better managed course information also has benefits for students in terms of course/module selection, access to up-to-date information, and parity of experience
*Better managed information allows institutions to analyse the performance of their course portfolio as well as meeting external reporting requirements.
*Curriculum design practices can be enhanced through face-to-face workshops with access to resources and guidance.
*Particularly effective resources include concise statements of educational principle with brief examples; and tools/resources for visualising the learning process, e.g. as a storyboard or timeline, or as a balance of learning/assessment activities.
*With better quality guidance and information available, curriculum teams can build credible benefit/business cases and respond more effectively to organisational priorities.

I would thoroughly recommend reading the the full report to anyone who is involved in any kind of curriculum design activity.

The report does signify the end of the programme, but plans are in place to ensure that the lessons learnt continue to be shared with the wider community. A number of openly available resources from the programme will be released over the coming months, including an info-kit style resource looking at business processes and curriculum information, and a resource pack including a number of tools and techniques developed by the projects for course development.

This blog is a major dissemination channel for my work, thoughts and general ponderings. In some ways it is my memory! Although it is searchable particularly by tags and topics, there are times when a straightforward and simple way of collating several posts and converting them to another format would be really useful. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while now, but never actually got round to doing anything about it.

Just now the final synthesis of the JISC Curriculum Design Programme is being produced. Over the programme life-cycle I have written quite a few posts relating directly to the programme and in particular a number of technical summaries and reviews. So yesterday I decided to try and actually stop thinking about collating them and actually try doing it.

My first port of call was Martin Hawskey as I know he has looked at this before and has the rather neat MASHezine PDF available on his blog. Unfortunately I can’t easily and quickly update my blog to include his plug in. This is due to the way our blogs are centrally hosted in CETIS. I’d need to ask someone else to do a wider upgrade -which isn’t impossible but not a huge priority and so could take a bit of time. However Martin did remind me of blog booker. Using this system you can export the content of a wordpress (and other major blogging platforms) and upload the file to the site, and it will automagically create a PDF “book” of your blog posts.

Again because of the way our CETIS blogs are set up, I had to export the content of my work blog into another wordpress site, export and then import in to the system. It works well, but didn’t give me quite the level of control of selection of posts I would have liked. I could get all the posts for a topic such as curriculum design (which again is one of the central topics our CETIS blogging system uses for aggregation on our website) but I couldn’t get just the posts with the programme tag which is what I really wanted. Note to self to discuss topics/tags in blogs. However, as a quick and (almost) free (you can donate to keep the service running) way to create a PDF book of blogs posts it’s certainly worth exploring.

This morning I had a wee search for alternatives and came across zinepal – another free (but with paid for options) which creates a variety of formats ( PDF, ePub, Kindle and Mobipocket). Again using an RSS feed or just a blog url the system will automagically create a book based on blog posts.

There is slightly more control on the actual posts you want to include once you enter a feed/url. You generally get the most recent 10 posts from any site/feed, so you may have to do a bit of feed manipulation if you want to use older posts. There are various controls over layout – number of columns, font etc, It is also possible to re-order and edit posts, and to add introductory text. If you pay $5 you can get extra features such as adding a logo and getting rid of their advertising. You can see the finished result (and download whatever version you like) here . Below is a screenshot of the PDF version.

Screen shot of zinepal PDF

Martin has also experimented with the service today and his alternative MASHezine using the free version of zinepal is available here.

If you have used any similar services or have any thoughts/tips, I’d love to hear about them.

Professor David Boud got this year’s eAssessment Scotland Conference off to a great start with his “new conceptions of feedback and how they might be put into practice” keynote presentation by asking the fundamental question ‘”what is feedback?”

David’s talk centred on what he referred to as the “three generations of feedback”, and was a persuasive call to arms to educators to move from the “single loop ” or “control system” industrial model of feedback to a more open adaptive system where learners play a central and active role.

In this model, the role of feedback changes from being passive to one which helps to develop students allowing them to develop their own judgement, standards and criteria. Capabilities which are key to success outside formal education too. The next stage from this is to create feedback loops which are pedagogically driven and considered from the start of any course design process. Feedback becomes part of the whole learning experience and not just something vaguely related to assessment.

In terms of technology, David did give a familiar warning that we shouldn’t enable digital systems to allow us to do more “bad feedback more efficiently”. There is a growing body of research around developing the types of feedback loops David was referring to. Indeed the current JISC Assessment and Feedback Programme is looking at exactly the issues brought up in the keynote, and is based on the outcomes of previously funded projects such as REAP and PEER. And the presentation from the interACT project I went to immediately after the keynote, gave an excellent overview of how JISC funding is allowing the Centre for Medical Education in Dundee to re-engineering its assessment and feedback systems to “improve self, peer and tutor dialogic feedback”.

During the presentation the team illustrated the changes to their assessment /curriculum design using an assessment time line model developed as part of another JISC funded project, ESCAPE, by Mark Russell and colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire.

Lisa Gray, programme manager for the Assessment and Feedback programme, then gave an overview of the programme including a summary of the baseline synthesis report which gives a really useful summary of the issues the projects (and the rest of the sector ) are facing in terms of changing attitudes, policy and practice in relation to assessment and feedback. These include:
*formal strategy/policy documents lagging behind current development
*educational principles are rarely enshrined in strategy/policylearners are not often actively enaged in developing practice
*assessment and feedback practice doesn’t reflect the reality of working life
*admin staff are often left out of the dialogue
*traditional forms of assessment still dominate
*timeliness of feedback are still an issue.

More information on the programme and JISCs work in the assessment domain is available here.

During the lunch break I was press-ganged/invited to take part in the live edutalk radio show being broadcast during the conference. I was fortunate to be part of a conversation with Colin Maxwell (@camaxwell), lecturer at Carnegie College, where we discussed MOOCs (see Colin’s conference presentation) and feedback. As the discussion progressed we talked about the different levels of feedback in MOOCs. Given the “massive” element of MOOCs how and where does effective feedback and engagement take place? What are the afordances of formal and informal feedback? As I found during my recent experience with the #moocmooc course, social networks (and in particular twitter) can be equally heartening and disheartening.

I’ve also been thinking more about the subsequent twitter analysis Martin has done of the #moocmooc twitter archive. On the one hand, I think these network maps of twitter conversations are fascinating and allow the surfacing of conversations, potential feedback opportunities etc. But, on the other, they only surface the loudest participants – who are probably the most engaged, self directed etc. What about the quiet participants, the lost souls, the ones most likely to drop out? In a massive course, does anyone really care?

Recent reports of plagiarism, and failed attempts at peer assessment in some MOOCs have added to the debate about the effectiveness of MOOCs. But going back to David Boud’s keynote, isn’t this because some courses are taking his feedback mark 1, industrial model, and trying to pass it off as feedback mark 2 without actually explaining and engaging with students from the start of the course, and really thinking through the actual implications of thousands of globally distributed students marking each others work?

All in all it was a very though provoking day, with two other excellent keynotes from Russell Stannard sharing his experiences of using screen capture to provide feedback, and Cristina Costa on her experiences of network feedback and feeding forward. You can catch up on all the presentations and join in the online conference which is running for the rest of this week at the conference website.

The programme explores curriculum design and the role technology plays in supporting changes to institutional practices and processes. The focus is on the different approaches to curriculum change and engaging stakeholders of two institutions involved in programme – Birmingham City University (BCU) and Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU).

Reporter Kim Catcheside talks to staff and students at both universities about their experiences. This includes an interview with Sonia Hendy-Isaac, a senior lecturer at Birmingham City University who explains how the T-SPARC project has been developing a framework which facilitates better dialogue and transparency around course design and approval to enable more agile and responsive curricula. Kim also talks to Professor Mark Stubbs, Head of Learning and Research Technologies at Manchester Metropolitan University about transformational changes to the curriculum there and the role of the Supporting Responsive Curricula project in supporting this. Project Manager, Peter Bird, discusses how some of these system and process changes are enabling academic staff to focus more on teaching and Professor Kevin Bonnet, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Student Experience, explains the business imperative for change at the institution.

Another useful insight into the different approaches institutions are taking to using technology to develop their provision for the future.

The session will mainly be discussion based, but we do have a short set of slides available. If you have any comments, then as usual please feel free to comment either on this post or via the comment space on slideshare.

Early this week Janet Finlay and Dawn Wood from the PC3 project (part of the JISC Curriculum Design Programme) shared their experiences of embedding coaching into the curriculum as Leeds Met.

The original aim of the PC3 project was “to develop curriculum structures and tech support to allow students to build their own curriculum supported by coaching”. However, as the project has evolved this overarching aim has been adapted so the focus of the project now is to: “embed coaching in the curriculum to provide personalised support for students and to enable them to make independent, informed decisions about their learning.”

Janet and Dawn gave an overview of the role of coaching and how it differs from mentoring,

Coaching diagram

and then shared some of the very positive experiences their coaching model is gaining with the BA Sports Management course. As well as embedding coaching as part of the PDP process within the course, the project has also supported the development of student coaching ambassadors and the session included audio reflections from a number of students of their experiences and reflections on the role of coaching in terms of their own development.

The team are now working with other schools across the University to embed coaching in to a range of different subject areas. A recording of this informative webinar is available to download from the Design Studio. The team are also running a one day event on coaching on 31st May in Leeds which is free and open to attend. More information is available from the PC3 project blog.